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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I've been able to append that to my .bashrc in other distros, and it causes the man pages to have colors. In the picture below shows it working in Fedora. It works in both zsh and bash. I have not tested it in any others. It does not work in Gentoo under zsh or bash. How come? How can it be made to work under Gentoo?

-r or --raw-control-chars
Causes "raw" control characters to be displayed. The default is to display control characters using the
caret notation; for example, a control-A (octal 001) is displayed as "^A". Warning: when the -r option
is used, less cannot keep track of the actual appearance of the screen (since this depends on how the
screen responds to each type of control character). Thus, various display problems may result, such as
long lines being split in the wrong place.
-R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
Like -r, but only ANSI "color" escape sequences are output in "raw" form. Unlike -r, the screen appear‐
ance is maintained correctly in most cases. ANSI "color" escape sequences are sequences of the form:
ESC [ ... m
where the "..." is zero or more color specification characters For the purpose of keeping track of
screen appearance, ANSI color escape sequences are assumed to not move the cursor. You can make less
think that characters other than "m" can end ANSI color escape sequences by setting the environment
variable LESSANSIENDCHARS to the list of characters which can end a color escape sequence. And you can
make less think that characters other than the standard ones may appear between the ESC and the m by
setting the environment variable LESSANSIMIDCHARS to the list of characters which can appear.

Why is this enabled? Would it be harmful if I removed it? The Gentoo Terminal, emerge, etc has a lot of colors, not sure why they would do this.

I just installed most. It's in the repositories, can be emerge'd. It defaults to using the same colors. All I needed to do after that was get the vim like jk keys to scroll up and down by creating a .mostrc, two lines. Also, put in .bashrc and .zshrc export PAGER="most"

Here is an article on the subject; I have to say that I tried it (SUSE) and was severely underwhelemed. Occasionally a single word gets coloured, but the large scale colouring that is seen in the article doesn't happen for me (although I can't say that I was that bothered...it just seemed like a cool trick).